An Epic Wizard has ordered the excavation of Tarrasque. Make lore with me!

[Windrammer]

Throw out whatever comes to your mind for this, be it for the mechanics of the encounter or the lore behind it.

All I have to give you is as follows:

A level 20 Wizard has many projects, among them is the excavation of tarrasque. He wants to destroy the world, you see, and trying to get tarrasque up and going can't hurt. However, HE will not be directly involved in the process. He's left a handful of underlings with the orders. Now however it's being done, the defense of it should pose a reasonable challenge for a trespassing level 10 party.

The story behind the burial? Tarrasque was a thing of ages long past, only a handful of people in the world have even the slightest hint of what it was, or is. It's last rampage ended with it being somehow sealed and incapacitated. Is it in a giant, warded box? Was it enchanted into sleeping really hard? Is it dead? Was it buried deliberately or was it just the semi-literal sands of time? All up to you guys!

[M Placeholder]

The Tarrasque, a beast from another planet.

In a wild space, far from this world, a ship found a world that was inhabited by a giant monster race that ate rocks. Seeing its diet, they reasoned that they could use it to terraform worlds. It changed worlds, alright - lacking the right diet that the creature thrived on its home world, it was driven insane and started to lay waste to the land.

After an epic battle, the creature was sealed in a separate demiplane, far from the eyes of the material plane. Now, a wizard has stumbled across its prison on the ethereal plane, and is planning to use it to destroy the world.

He's not going to release the beast from its cage though. Hes going to throw the entire world into the cage through an unspeakable arcane ritual. If this test run succeeds, then this world will be one of many thrown to the beast.

[Crake]

You could say that it was crushed under enough preassure that it was eventually completely petrified like a fossil, as the preassure was dealing more damage than it could regenerate. But as soon as it was excavated, that preassure was gone and it's started regenerating... slowly, bit by bit, but it's coming back.

I also personally like to use the tarrasque as more of an "elder evil" (though of neutral alignment, so more like a natural disaster) and in my game, I have miniature tarrasques that kinda drop off it, initially as lumps of flesh, but then they regenerate into a little tarrasque of their own, which then charge forward and pillage the surrounding land as the creature slowly but surely makes it's way to some major city.

If you want to read more on it, I made a thread a while ago here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?335217-Vanguard-of-the-tarrasque), which have a bunch of other ideas for playing with the tarrasque that I didn't use.

Edit: As an update to people who participated in that thread, I actually had the first wave of mini tarrasques attack just last night in my game, after putting it all together so long ago :smallbiggrin:

[atemu1234]

A world I made has many tarrasques because of a certain... adventurous... Dragon.

[Flickerdart]

You have a couple of spell options that could lie at the heart of the entrapment:
Imprisonment (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/imprisonment.htm) is a great one, since it would require the would-be unearthers to first find the exact location of the entrapment and then conduct an incantation (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/incantations.htm) to cast freedom and release it. Alternatively, they might be digging up the sphere the old-fashioned way.
Binding (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/binding.htm) is a classic - the original caster could have set some obscure condition that the minions are now trying to meet. This works better when they don't know exactly what the conditions are, and keep trying new things like varying the number of juggling mice.

[Fouredged Sword]

Past the Mountains of Despair, beyond the quake shaken slopes of the Evenfalls, lies the valley of Gorehold through which runs the Red River. Guarded by the blood painted Dwarves who guard this valley, up the literal river of blood that runs through their hold, lies the eater of worlds. It is bound by great spikes of adimantium and riverind chains, anchoring it to the ground through it's everbleeding flesh. It's body is half submerged in a lake of it's own blood, forever wounded but by whatever eldrich force animates it, forbidden to die.

It is said that it will be unchained to feast at the end of days. The dwarves stand guard on the belief that they are the final guard that protects all of creation.

They are right. Too bad it won't be enough.

[eggynack]

I read this title, and for some reason I thought it was indicating an epic wizard sending his underlings to excavate into a tarrasque, to retrieve some item. And it was amazing. Like, he just trivially dispatched with the tarrasque allip style, but didn't really care enough to wish it away, and now he lost his frigging keys in there, and some monsters have made its half-alive body its home. The wizard would do it, because he's so powerful that such a task would be trivial and take seconds, but he happens to be really lazy, as should be indicated by the lack of wishing away. I figure that this would bite reality in the ass later on, because in accordance with my second nifty tarrasque idea, an evil artificer might meet the tarrasque, bestow it with intelligence, give it magic items that fill the gaps in its capabilities, and ride around on it wreaking havoc.

[Telonius]

Backstory idea: The original Tarrasque was a Wizard's Familiar - a cat. The Wizard kept altering his faithful companion, granting him template after template, in an effort to build the most fearsome beast ever created, all under his control!

Unfortunately, he forgot that he was still basically dealing with a cat. The "under his control" thing didn't work out so well.

They were finally able to snare the beast using a Faerie Fire spell to draw it into a secluded cave, where a magic item had been set up to continually cast a Daylight spell through a window onto the Tarrasque. This induced a coma-like state in the beast. It isn't exactly asleep, it just doesn't see any reason to move.

[daremetoidareyo]

Make the act of excavating the Tarrasque as like to an archaeological dig of a giant fossil. Then the PC's receive reports of strange insectoid giant monster wrecking through cities. Do a sidequest adventure. And have newer, geographically closer, reports of giant Locusts, that radiate a noxious blue light are crashing through their cities. A Whatevertheheck skillcheck will allow PCs to piece together that the dates of the attacks are showing 3 different straitline trajectories towards the tarrasque archaeolgical site.

Template insect celestial things out the wazzoo until you got something that can stand up to a tarrasque with two of his clonebrothers to beat it into submission and fill it full of thermomagically encased eggs spawn. Each of which 1000 eggs of which complete the tarrasque lifecycle.

You see boys and girls, when a mommy tarrasque loves a daddy tarrasque, she colonizes a nice little nest and gets sleepy and takes a nap. Sometimes when mean little humanoids come and prod her, she wakes up and swats them off of her back. Once when the cosmological configuration aligns, mommy starts to diffuse magicalpheromones to attract all of the worthy male tarrasques. Male tarrasques, as we all know, are weird godzilla-type monster bugs that only love mommy tarrasque as far as they can inject their ovipositor. Male tarrasques rampage from as far away as close planets for the opportunity to reproduce. Once the two sexes...ahem...meet, the mothers body gives way to suddenly crystallize. (Stat up that crystal, buddy, someone's gonna try to bust through.) After 30 days or so, the little baby tarrasque eggs finish eating all the delicious innards of the Mother, and the build up of some magical gas finally erupts: expelling the hundreds of baby tarrasques with so much power to plunge them out of the atmosphere, ozone, whathaveyou and well into space, where they disperse (remember the cosmological factors, man) to all of the prime material worlds for PCs to test their mettle against.

[Threadnaught]

A Tarrasque, is apocalypse incarnate and in it's heart lies the power to create an entirely new prime material plane. The home plane of the Tarrasques, is an amalgamation of every single previous plane since the beginning of time, each untouched by their destructive power, unlike the actual planes themselves.
If a Tarrasque is permanently killed before destroying the world, or succeeds and a new world is formed, another Tarrasque arrives from their home plane. The gateway remains open long enough for things to travel both ways.

Wizard is looking for something that doesn't exist in their own world, so they're trying all of them.

[Renen]

Do the forget to make the lore about how the evil wizard is senile and stuff. Heck, maybe he is actually trying to do good, but got his rituals messed up. Only way a level 20 wizard will be "thwarted" by anyone.

[LooseCannoneer]

Do the forget to make the lore about how the evil wizard is senile and stuff. Heck, maybe he is actually trying to do good, but got his rituals messed up. Only way a level 20 wizard will be "thwarted" by anyone.

Or the wizard could be one of those "back in AD&D" types who think that the only necessary spells are blast and save-or-die. You know, optimized to do nothing besides deal damage.